August 15, 2007

Published in Wake Forest, NC

            This gives him more time to finish raising the $20,000 needed to cut the house in two and re-assemble it on a North College Street lot and to get estimates from all the contractors who would be needed, including a structural engineer, plumbers, electricians, and house cutters.

            Roth said there are still two questions. “Can we do it? Do we have the time?”

            The brown-shingled Craftsman-style bungalow that has sat on West Avenue since the 1920s is referred to as the Lake house because the I. Beverly Lake Sr. family lived there in the late 1930s and early 1940s.

            Lake was then a law professor at Wake Forest College who was a candidate for governor in 1960 and 1964. In 1965 he was appointed a justice of the North Carolina Supreme Court where he served 13 years.

            His son, I. Beverly Lake Jr., who recently retired after five years as the Chief Justice of the N.C. Supreme Court, has been helping raise the $20,000 needed to move the house in two pieces.

            An earlier plan to move the house without cutting it collapsed because moving the cables and poles for Embarq and Time Warner Cable would have been too expensive and caused long outages. Cutting the house in two will allow it to be moved along the narrow – 20 to 22 feet wide – tree-lined North College Street without the extensive tree-trimming and cutting and utility moving the whole house would have.

            The Wake Forest commissioners pledged a month ago to forego several fees and to provide equipment and crews to cut limbs and move electric lines up to $20,000.

            The Southeastern Baptist Theological Seminary has also pledged $20,000 for the move in addition to donating the house to CAP. Ryan Hutchinson, the seminary’s senior vice president for business administration, has spent a great amount of time working with Roth on the move.

            The house must be moved because it stands in the footprint for the future Patterson Hall. Roth said the seminary moved back the deadline for the house because the engineers who would decide how best to demolish it cannot inspect it until the 24^th.

            “If we had been able to move it to a lot nearby, we would not have all this,” Roth said. Last November the town commissioners voted three to two – Commissioners Stephen Barrington, Velma Boyd and David Camacho in the majority – not to sell an empty lot at the corner of South Avenue and South College Street to Capital Area Preservation. Roth, Hutchinson and others have tried unsuccessfully to find another suitable lot near the campus.

            Three local CAP board members, chairman Kathryn Drake, Mary Schilling and Andy Ammons have been great helps in raising the last $20,000, Roth said. He did not want to say how much has been raised.

            If you want to help move the Lake house, you can pledge a donation by calling 833-6404.